I finally made my way to the part of the To Do list that allowed for some digging in the soil. I meant to do this a couple of weeks ago, thinking I was already late, but realize now, as I count back the weeks from our Last Frost Date (LFD) that I’m right on target, more or less. Checking back to last year, when at this time I was on the fence about starting seeds at all, I see that the vigorous seedlings I toted to our first Farmer’s Market weren’t even started for another week or more. It’s not too often that I find myself ahead of the game.
The trusty lunch pail was overhauled in the process. All of the seeds that you see here are left from last year and should be viable, provided that accidental 24 hour stint in the sun-baked greenhouse during the summer doesn’t shoot my efforts in the foot.
Building off of last year’s great success, I invested in an assortment of soil block makers. I can’t even begin to say how fantastic the teeny 3/4″ blocks are. There are over 600 little blocks warming up by the fire in these 3 pans. Once they germinate, I’ll set them up under my lights and pot them on to a bigger soil block with this handy tool. That I can start so many things using so much less soil, in a fraction of the space, is a real boon to me. I used Nancy Bubel’s advice for making my soil mix: 2 parts peat moss, 1 part garden soil (which I regrettably had to buy, not having had the insight to bring some in before it froze) and 1 part compost. For this, I drained the sludge from the bottom of our worm compost bin, gave the kids an hour of fun picking out the worms inadvertently transferred to the mix, and found it to be a perfect consistency.
Harvest time always hits me with such a panic. The boundless ambition and energy that embodied the Spring garden have left in their wake the inevitable results of such unbridled enthusiasm – an exhausted, overwhelmed, can’t-eat-another-bite ghost town garden. From mid-to-late summer, it’s a lawless place, overrun with weeds and regret and I-should-really-though-I-know-I’m-not-going-to-so-I’ll-just-feel-bad-about-it-alls. Getting the bounty out of the garden and through the door is hard enough with such sapped energy reserves; taking the time to save the seeds? Yeah, right.
Our first winter out here was spent with my nose in this book for a little while…or just long enough to realize that there was so much more to seed saving than just collecting the seeds and planting them the following year. It intimidated the hell out of me, quite frankly, so I chucked the book onto the tip-top of the bookshelf till I was better seasoned. The Seed Savers Exchange is a noble organization, I reassured myself, content to buy all of my seeds from them for awhile. But the price tag for putting in the garden this year was a shock. Medicinal herbs, annuals, native plants – they made for a hefty bill when added to the already-generous vegetable seed order. Still, that was rather offset by my sales of seedlings at the Farmer’s Market, so I put it out of my mind till a friend asked me to save some zinnias for seed when I came to clear-cut them for wool dyeing. Aha! So I bought some paper lunch bags, threw in some mature plant heads, hung them up, and left them for dead. They’re still there, in a growing chorus of similarly-abandoned plant material. I hope that one of these days, I’ll have nothing better to do than revisit them, separate all the dried plant material from the seeds, then pop them in a cute manilla coin-size envelope. (because I think they’re adorable, those envelopes, and I’ve been searching for an excuse to get some) If such an opportunity does not arrive before the Spring, well, then I guess I’ll play it by ear and maybe plant the seeds amidst all the other dried parts and call it mulch. And then? If they don’t come up exactly like their parents? Well, then I’ll write it down for next year.
I did get that book back out, though, to consult it for the tomato saving instructions. They involve squeezing out the seedy pulp, leaving it sit for a few days to get moldy, then washing away the moldy gunk, leaving only the viable seeds behind and successfully breaking through the seed coating. I got the idea to try it after Grandma snuck a couple of my heirloom tomatoes into her pocket to save for herself.
Speaking of Grandma, who’s faithfully served potatoes at every single meal since the beginning of time, (like any god-fearing woman should) I’d like to report my first-ever successful potato harvest. Delightful Yellow Finns commingle quite beautifully with All Blues, don’t you think? And since I make it a point to never peel my potatoes, those blue ones make the most magical purple whipped potatoes you’ve ever seen.
Joining the spuds in the larder this winter are these sweet potatoes. A fair-to-middling harvest, but good enough for me to write off as a success. Back to Grandma – she has a hot tip about covering the row with clear plastic to make it extra-toasty for these heat-seekers. I’ll be pestering her for that this winter when I’m hatching my garden plans. And back to “larder” - that’s a word I’m working to put in my everyday vocabulary. Imagine the change that would manifest in our pasty-white food culture if the concept of the larder became mainstream. Imagine!
I am currently out of the office. A business trip has taken me to scour my gardens and those of my friends and neighbors for the last bits of summer color, which I will inject into a giant box of wool. Our farmhouse kitchen is also out-of-the-office, as it has been thoroughly (and inconveniently) transformed into a dyeing workshop. While I am away, (mentally, if nothing else) all school lunches will be Hot, suppers will alternate between Popcorn and Frozen Pizza and all laundry needs should be sufficiently met by any one of the four heaping baskets of clean, unfolded clothes. If you have a matter of great urgency during my absence, please direct your calls to Captain Daddio at ext. 47. I hope to return soon, though I am quite happily occupied.
I’ll bet you’d find that you were wrong. I’ll bet that, when you cook up fresh, gorgeous beauties like these–lightly steam them, perhaps, toss them in butter and salt–you’d find them to be nothing at all like those gritty, pale green lima posers found in the mix of bagged frozen vegetables. I’ll bet you’d drop your fork after taking the first bite and look suspiciously at the person who prepared them. “Lima beans?” you’d say. “There is no way these are lima beans – these are delicious. I hate lima beans.” But you’d be wrong. Perhaps what you really mean, what you’re quickly coming to realize with each passing buttery bite, is that you used to hate lima beans and probably only because they were poorly prepared. Perhaps from this point on, you’d mark on your calendar that season when lima beans are harvested fresh and hold it in the same esteem as that short-windowed asparagus season. Perhaps, even, you’d get yourself a seed catalog and eagerly await the order you’ll place to grow your own lovely Christmas Lima beans or the spectacular Scarlet Runner beans, which are eaten in the same manner as limas.
Like magic, this arrived in the mail last week. I had sent them a box full of washed fleece packed so tight that I imagine opening it was like playing with a jack-in-the-box. The fleece that exploded out of the box was washed again, carded, combed, and then spit out into one continuous piece of this lovely wool, called “combed top.” But I like to imagine that they have a contraption not unlike the Playdough extruder, where you shove in a blob and squeeze out a nice continuous piece shaped like a star. How fun would that job be? It reminds me of a textbook I had in 5th grade, with a picture of a crayon assembly line, thousands of crayons lined up in rainbow formation. I came home from school announcing that I was going to work THERE when I grew up. My parents quickly squashed that idea, probably because they both work in factory settings and wanted loftier goals for me.
But have I really strayed so far from the crayon ideal I’ve held on to all this time? I wondered this yesterday as I plucked these zinnias hours before our first frost and placed them for drying in a hanging basket. Surely this is one of the most sensually rich jobs one could muster, I thought. From teeny-tiny lamb to sheep to lanolin-rich shorn wool to that lovely combed top to spinning wheel to lovely plant dyebath to skein of yarn…it’s like an orgy for the senses.
The timing of all of this loveliness, though, has been a mixed bag. The impending frost coinciding with the arrival of this new book - Harvesting Color by Rebecca Burgess – a fantastically-beautiful book, I might add, prompted me to harvest every last zinnia blossom. I hadn’t planned on dyeing with them, so I turned to the instructions and quickly learned that they must be used fresh. Damn. This seems to be the case with most of the dye plants I’ve grown so far, especially the Japanese Indigo. I covered that with a tarp last night to protect the tender tips from Jack Frost and will do so again tonight, hoping for balmier dyeing weather next week, after some crucial supplies arrive in the mail. The zinnias, however, I decided to use on the spot.
At the same time supper was being prepared, the zinnias quietly steeped on the stove. Then I added the only skein of Irene’s wool that I’ve been able to process so far. And this is what came out of the dyepot. A lovely first go at plant dyeing, don’t you think?
(And now I must quickly rant about how irritated I am that the much-loved name of Irene, our fondly remembered ewe, has been sullied the world over with the new context of a devastating hurricane. Who picks these names? How about a different naming system, one that doesn’t represent actual names? I would imagine the Katrinas of the world would agree with me.)
The metaphor of precious jewels is irresistible when describing the season of canning. Reds, golds, vibrant indigo, plum – I now understand that the color “plum” refers to the cooked fruit, not the fresh- those colors of the harvest, as seen through sparkling glass jars, is one hallmark of Fall for us. It’s a frenzy, though, a race to get through the abundance of everything that has ripened all at the same time. This year, aided by the steadfast attendance of the bees, we’ve discovered fruit bursting from previously-undiscovered nooks and crannies.
Herein lies one of the most difficult lessons of managing a very full life. Get as much done as you can and let go of the rest. It rang familiar to me as I typed this, and I vaguely remembered feeling a similar sentiment in the past. Oh yes – last year’s garden recap post. Hee hee.
There are, at this moment, no rotting tomatoes on my kitchen counter (yet) but the little sweeties I’ve set aside for drying are starting to tap their toes. Setting up shop at my local Farmer’s Market has proved to be a handy impetus to can like a dickens. I managed to follow through on several years of intent by harvesting elderberries this year and making jam. A thick, sweeeeet jam, but one that will still prove quite handy at banishing winter colds. The biggest surprise was that I was able to pick all the berries I needed from our own bushes, without having to forage elsewhere, a feat made possible, no doubt, by the bees.
Stewed tomatoes were my opening act. See how strange and oblong these beauties are? They look like giant red peppers. What you can’t see on the inside is their delicious flesh, almost completely absent of seeds and juice. They are Federles – chosen specifically for this fleshy-ness. They can up like a dream – all tomato and little juice.
Isadora joined me in the Sisterhood of Canning this year, as a very promising skin-peeler. I can’t quite put it into words, but I’ve started to get a sense of an almost-primal connection to a larger community of women doing the very same thing this time of year. I know that, as I blanch and peel and fill my jars, that Mom and Grandma and Aunt are doing the same, perhaps even that very day. Neighbors, friends, passing acquaintances from the market, too. It’s hard to describe how satisfying that is, how rhythmically appropriate and in tune with the season, and how visceral the pleasure from so literally providing for my family – from seed, to plant, to fruit, to jar. Gosh, that’s good stuff. But it’s a lot of busy work. A lot. Pulling elderberries from their clusters took me hours and was one of those activities that teetered between mind-numbing and meditative, depending upon your mood. I swayed more to the mind-numbing side, sadly.
What great strides I’ve made over last year. In the cellar are proudly displayed 10 quarts of stewed tomatoes, 6 quarts of the absolute best marinara I can muster (way better than last year), 6 pints of plums (plums! I bought them on a whim at a Farmer’s Market), the aforementioned elderberry jam, dill pickle slicers, dilly beans, pickled jalapeno-type peppers… and the harvest has only started. We’ve discovered an abundance of grapes (again, thanks bees!) that might make a nice jelly, there are so many more tomatoes in progress, as well as peppers. What remains to join these jewels in the cellar will be determined by whatever time and energy I can muster in the weeks to come. And grace. I’m holding tight to the satisfaction I’ve gleaned so far this season, in case these jewels manage to be the only ones I mine this year. Winter eating will be our best yet.
These cabbages were truly the pride of my garden this year. Started from seed, grown so big and lovely…the garden is quite lackluster now without them. Now they patiently wait in the cool of the basement till the Kraut King arrives with his trusty shredder, stone crock, and sack full of salt. I am waiting for the trumpet blast which never fails to announce his arrival. Hear, hear: there shall be kraut for all the kingdom! Perhaps we should have grown some pork to accompany such a bounty of cabbage.
The Sheep Garden, where we sadly grow no sheep but instead miscellaneous vegetables, is in.
The Main Garden, that most drily named, is in.
In a fight whose intensity kept up till the bitter end, the most evil of all grasses–with roots that stretch clear to China–was slain, eviscerated, and laid out to die a horrible death. This, after careful placement of some spinach seeds, completed the last row of the last garden. As gory as that sounds, it was all too kind, given the agenda of the grass to spread its menace over THE ENTIRE WORLD. It took all I had and then some to wrench it from its ironclad hold in the earth. Sonofa. It was the kind of triumph that demanded some expletives to mark the victory and reflect on the magnitude of the battle. Sonofa.
There’s a lot more left to do, of course. There’s mulching and weeding and a lot of other things I’ll tuck in here or there. Oh, and there’s this wee little raised bed I decided to put in for all of my dye plants. Being a ‘bed’ and not a ‘garden,’ my opening declaration holds.
We had the pleasure of touring Will Allen’s Growing Power facility in Milwaukee a couple of weeks ago.
Before I start, can we just take a moment to appreciate the enormity of this pile of compost? Oh, what a thing of beauty, towering over us, smelling sweet and earthy. If you twisted my arm and had me choose my favorite part of the tour, it would be hard to narrow down to just one thing, but this sky-scraping compost would definitely be in the running.
Do you know about Growing Power? (if so, meditate on this compost while I bring everyone else up to speed)
You might know that Will Allen was a basketball player? More importantly, he was the son of farmers, sharecroppers. After leaving basketball, he settled with his wife on her turf, just outside of Milwaukee. He took a job as a working stiff, which put him on the road driving past this vacant property stacked with greenhouses, day after day. As the tour guide tells it, it was the proximity to the city’s largest low-income housing project combined with the lack of a grocery store within any reasonable distance, combined with his own farming roots that fueled the initiative to start providing good, fresh, clean food to the people in his neighborhood. He purchased the property, the last city tract to bear Agricultural zoning, and soon opened up a farm stand for the folks in his new neighborhood. The facility has since become a paradigm for urban agriculture, putting into practice revolutionary models for growing clean, nutritious, real food anywhere, everywhere.
The very morning after the last day of school found the kids and I packed into the car for a short road trip to Milwaukee, where we were to meet my mom and grandma. It was cool and grey that day, and we tried to blow off some pent-up travel energy at the playground with the little bit of time we had before the tour started. Cold and wet and approaching naptime, I braced myself for the worst – being stuck in a guided tour with two cold, wet, cranky kids. Minutes before the tour started, we joined up with Mom and Grandma and from that moment on, the energy shifted to a more positive note.
There was so much to see. The first part of the tour featured the insightful aquaponics system that is setting a new standard in agriculture. Water + fish (tilapia) swimming about inside a greenhouse = our full attention. We were going to be fine, I quickly realized - the fast pace of the tour was nicely fitted to the fast-paced nature of those little attention spans. Next we got to pass around a container of velvety soft compost. You had us at water and fish, Mr. Allen, but digging our hands into a bucket of dirt (good dirt!) sealed the deal. Next were the worms. You may not know it, but we have worms too – a mostly forgotten colony of red wigglers cheerfully composting small amounts of kitchen waste in our basement. Somehow this didn’t diminish the excitement of seeing vast bins of worms hard at work. We lifted the damp burlap covering the bins and gently poked around till we could spot them.
So to this point, we’d seen fish in water, played with dirt, and played hide & seek with worms. Heading outside, we were greeted by the massive pile of compost and the Alpine dairy goats. Can you see how this is going, how each of us was nearly floating on a euphoric cloud? Watching The Boy commune in his intuitive way with the goats – I could watch him interact with animals all day long – witnessing The Girl pluck broken leaves off the greenhouse floor and discovering Arugula!, watching how engrossed they both were in the laying flock of chickens…
…it was such an affirmation for me. That they were so excited to see the chickens was a shock. There’s no shortage of hens at home and I’d thought this would diminish the excitement of seeing them on the tour, but in fact I think it helped them to relate to the farm more personally. Same with the worms, the bees, the seedlings, and the compost. Not one of us was bored or anything less than excited about any of these things, despite them being familiar and part of our own everyday. I was so struck by this, so wholly surprised. The more I think about it now, the more I begin to wonder if our pure, visceral enjoyment that day came from the connection we felt as budding farmers to the bigger community before us. A kinship, I think, to the farm that shared so many of our own closely-held ideals.
Wow. I had expected to be mildly inspired. Expected to learn some new things, hoped the kids wouldn’t implode. Hoped to spend some nice time with Mom and Grandma in a mutually-interesting setting. What I got instead, what we all got, blew these tepid expectations right out of the water–right out of the giant rainwater catchment tank that housed hungry bluegills and perch fingerlings.
In a celebratory Father’s Day breakfast fit for a Captain, (a Captain Daddio) the very last of the season’s asparagus was bid adieu.
For its final act, it was dressed in prosciutto and surrounded by some of its very best friends: poached eggs, Bearnaise sauce (which seems to me to be like a Hollandaise but with vinegar and lots of tarragon) and fancy-cut toast. Sometimes the most important part of meal prep around here is careful attention to marketing. For this meal, bread was elevated to the status of “butterfly toast” simply by arranging the diagonally-cut quarters carefully on each plate. Bullseye. Who can resist a special butterfly breakfast?
Not this guy. Isadora declared it “the best breakfast I ever had,” though she frequently speaks in the superlative when rating meals. It was a meal that featured both a delicious sauce AND visually-stunning, luminous cured meat that melts on the tongue, so you can bet that I loved it. And Daddio, the Star of the Day? He stopped just short of licking the plate.
